Martin Bailey

Martin is an experienced social worker with over 30 years of experience working in the public sector. An excellent trainer, innovator and coach, he is skilled at motivating others, facilitating change and developing capacity in people and teams. He has trained many hundreds of staff, mentored individuals, spoken at national, regional and local conferences and developed new approaches to work.

Starting his career in children’s residential services, Martin helped to develop a stepped approach to leaving care – beginning his interest in behaviour change.

Martin then developed a work stream and became strategic lead for children’s participation in a large local authority. Undertaking developmental work, budget and strategic responsibility, he pioneered a range of evidence based approaches to ensuring the involvement of the most vulnerable children in decision-making processes.

Martin undertook a research masters degree (Msc) into child participation. This required highly effective skills and reflective analysis of complex data. He has also undertaken further work, including literature review and statistical analysis of child participation in child protection. Martin concluded with guidance, training and the implementation of strategic plans. He then undertook further research with vulnerable families into their experiences of safeguarding services and presented findings at the BASW conference in May 2010.

He co-authored the book Mastering Communication in Social Work. He has also undertaken service evaluations including examining the effectiveness of the Graded Care Profile and a Local Authority resource panel.

Professional qualifications

Martin holds a Masters degree by Research from the University of Hertfordshire (2010), a BA and DiPsw (1993), also from the University of Hertfordshire and a Bsc in Social Sciences from Buckinghamshire College of Higher Education (1989).

Martin is a member of BASW (the college of social work) and is HCPC registered.